Tidbits of info that did not warrant individual pages have been clustered here in no particular order. This is truly trivial stuff for fervent attophiles only! For everyone else, may I suggest the Showcase?

What does Attoboy mean?
What does Ophiuchi mean?
I don't get it...
So if those are star maps, how can "contact" appear in two different locations?
Why don't your menus close automatically like on other sites?
Some of those showcase pages sure have a lot of thumbnails!
I liked the old yellow site better
Why are the comics in Diversions rather than Showcase?
Will this site see regular updates?
What's "in" for design right now?
Website architecture
Website construction toolset
Current hardware
Current toys
Still have questions unanswered?

It is an artificial word that was originally used as an imprint for a minicomic I published many years ago. The first half of the word is the mathematical prefix "atto," which is the smallest metric division. It comes well after micro and nano and means one quintillionth of a unit.

"Boy" just gives it a nice bounce. Kind of like a cutesy superhero. Or is that just me? Don't answer that.

For more information, see What is Attoboy?

The interface elements and site in general are inspired by concepts that appear in John Varley's story, The Ophiuchi Hotline, the details of which we won't get into here. The Hotline is a mysterious stream of incoherent data originating somewhere in deep space that is mined by data prospectors searching for useful information. This begs the question of whether Attoboy represents the Hotline or the prospector.

The topnav is a stylized star map with the major website sections represented by labeled key navigational points. The index of each section displays a clickable zoomed view of its respective navigational point. It's kind of goofy, but I like that sort of thing. Hopefully it looks reasonably authentic without looking as military as many high tech interfaces.

The contact label in the topnav starmap shifts position based on the width of your browser and implies that the contact point is wa-a-ay out there while the contact label in the localized starmap on the attoinfo index page holds its position and implies that the contact point is quite near. This is pretty much how it went in The Ophiuchi Hotline. Now see what you've done? Your curiosity has ruined the ending of the book for everyone.

The menus on Attoboy work similarly to those in most applications and operating systems. One click opens the menu and it stays open until you select something or click again on the menu title to close the menu. I experimented with a delayed auto-close, but the timing varied so much depending on browser and processor speed that it created more problems than it solved.

Auto-closing menus are ubiquitous on the web, but many users are discovering a serious downside in that it can be very frustrating when tripwire menus snap shut or cascade willy nilly at the slightest provocation. Slow code can acerbate the matter as the browser continues to open and close menus long after the user has stopped moving the mouse. It's gotten so bad that some clients are specifically requesting that menus be removed from their sites.

Yes, yes they do. I'll try to contain the thumbnails and prevent them from multiplying in a bid to take over the world and steal our women and iPods..

Yeah, and I liked you better in 1996, too. You've changed, man.

I am glad you liked the old yellow site. I liked it, too, but felt it was time for a change. Sometimes change is more about the creator than the audience. This is probably one of those times. Hopefully this new look will grow on you. Let me know.

Comics are like sex and other art is like violence. Almost everyone has more firsthand experience with the former than the latter, but the former is still excluded from polite society. Meanwhile everyone laps up inaccurate reproductions of the latter like it is ice cream. The Showcase is for polite society and Diversions is for my kind of people. 'Nuff said.

Yes, this site will be updated monthly. Most recent additions will be highlighted on the frontpage, so you can check there to see what is new. There is a lot of archived work that will find its way up here, so the showcase will experience the most growth initially.

I am not a big advocate of fashion, aside from the marketing cash grab benefits. My feeling is that if something is truly good, time does not diminish it; if something is truly bad, popularity does not improve it. Fashion is best left to those whose opinions have influence if not relevance.

Everything - styles, navigation, page templates - is PHP driven. This is not apparent in the url's which look like traditional paths. I wanted to be able to provide simple links to pages within my site rather than the complex POST laden links that many PHP sites use.

Attoboy was put together using Illustrator, Photoshop, Graphic Converter and Tex-Edit on OS9. I've added so many scripts to Tex-Edit over the years that it is almost a custom web app for me. I love it. As for the rest, I think I use Illustrator the most. There is still the odd foray into Flash. ImageStyler seems to be indispensable at times, too.

G3 350 BW (Yosemite) and Blueberry iBook 300. I guess I am waiting for Apple to make another blue computer. I also really like my little Contour Minipro optical mouse. It is the only two button mouse I know of that has a front/back rather than left/right button configuration, and it is a good size for me. (Just slightly smaller than the Apple ADB II mouse and the Sony VAIO mouse.)

Painter all the way. It just doesn't get any better than this. Only reason to own a Corel product. The gallery of fun also includes iTunes, Snood and Diablo2. I had no idea iTunes would so embed itself into my daily routine. It's like running your own radio station.